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When you learn to spot the symptoms of tooth decay, you can better help your child take care of their smile. Because little ones are still developing their brushing and flossing skills, we must stress the importance of regularly removing plaque without skipping hygiene sessions. If your child wakes up with a pain in one of their teeth that will not go away, you should call us right away. We can X-ray the tooth to determine the cause of the pain and provide immediate relief with a filling or other treatment.

At your Shirley, NY, pediatric dentist and orthodontist, we promote a preventive attitude toward caring for children’s smiles. This means scheduling cleaning and exams twice per year to help them on their smile journey. By creating a detailed dental record, we can observe any sudden changes in your child’s smile and provide treatment whenever necessary.

Understanding How Cavities Form

How do we detect decay in the enamel of your children’s smile? When your little one attends their biannual checkup, our hygienist will remove all plaque from the surface of their teeth before we perform an examination. This means that twice per year, we can catch any active smile concerns early in their development instead of letting them get out of hand. This preventive attitude toward smile care prevents decay by cleaning their teeth and treating it immediately when discovered during the exam portion.

If instead of attending regular checkups, you wait to notice the symptoms of decay on your own at home, significant damage can occur to your little one’s smile. Eventually, bacteria can reach to the tooth’s inner chamber and cause a dangerous infection. At this point, your child will require root canal therapy instead of a simple dental filling or crown.

Extra Protection For Children’s Smiles

To assist your kid in protecting their smile from tooth decay, we provide fluoride treatments at the end of each checkup. This procedure helps remineralize the enamel to provide more strength against the acidic degradation of plaque. We also offer physical protection in the form of dental sealants we can apply to a child’s back molars. Because children are still developing the dexterity necessary to reach their back teeth, sealants prevent bacteria and debris from becoming caught between the ridges of these teeth. After application, the sealants simply wear away over the years, requiring no further treatment to take them off your child’s teeth.

Speak With Your Shirley, NY, Pediatric Dentist About Taking Steps To Fight Tooth Decay

We can help your children fight tooth decay with our preventive services. If you want to learn more about preventing and treating cases of tooth decay for kids, then contact Shirley Orthodontics and Pediatric Dentistry in Shirley, NY, by calling (631) 399-1600.